Talker

up around his
    back.
    Brian brought his hand up to touch Tate’s hands, and Tate
    whispered, “Tell me I didn’t imagine it.”
    “You didn’t imagine it.”
    “Tell me it will be true in the morning.”
    “It’s been true for the last nine months—hel , the last two and a
    half years—I don’t know why it would change now.”
    Talker nodded, and rested his cheek against Brian’s shoulder.
    “O kay. I can eat now.”
    “G ood,” Brian said gruffly. “You’re getting too thin.”
    They sat and ate, much like they used to, and Talker told him
    about work and about the new DJ and about the cooks in the back
    who kept trying out new shit that tasted exactly like shit, and then
    he stopped.
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    “This is how it happened,” he said, looking at Brian. Brian
    stopped mid-bite and looked back.
    “This is how what happened?”
    “This is how I never knew. You just… you sit and listen. You
    never talk.”
    “I only talk when I’ve got something to say,” Brian said
    logical y, not sure how to fix this. He was talking as much as he
    could, now—it had to be enough, right?
    Talker nodded, and took a thoughtful bite of Brian’s omelet—
    he’d cleaned his plate, and Brian stil had butterflies in his stomach.
    “You know, I was thinking about C hristmas.”
    Brian flushed. “My gift was pretty lame,” he apologized. When
    they’d moved in, they couldn’t afford both the PG &E and the SMUD
    deposits. As a result, they’d had to make a choice between heat
    and light. They’d chosen light, and had spent much of their winter
    wrapped up in blankets. Brian had borrowed Lyndie’s sewing
    machine and a bunch of her old sheets and put together triple
    layers of old sheet, old fuzzy blanket from a thrift store, and another
    old sheet, and sewn it together into a sort of a poor man’s
    comforter, since he and Tate hadn’t ever seemed to get warm
    enough.
    “It was perfect,” Tate said, and Brian doubted it. “I especially
    liked the list of music you put on the card, the shit you’d buy me
    when you had the money. That.… Jesus. But that wasn’t what I
    was thinking about.”
    “Then what?”
    “The tree.”
    “What about it?”
    “I mention to you once, in like two years, that I’ve never been
    in my own home with my own C hristmas tree, and one night I get
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    back from work and you went out to your aunt’s and chopped down
    a tree. And you decorated it with club fliers and construction paper
    chains and popcorn and feather boas you got at the dol ar store.…”
    Brian blushed again and Tate shook his head and wiped his
    eyes with the back of his hand.
    “I’m so stupid,” Tate said, and Brian said, “That’s not true!”
    right on top of him.
    “No, I am—you’re always saying how stupid you are, but.…”
    And now he wiped his face with his palm. “How could I look at that
    tree, and the blanket you made me, and al the times you cooked
    me dinner… how could I look at those things and not know you
    loved me? How could I.…” His voice broke. “O h G od, Brian—you
    told me that night, and I had so much noise going on in my head
    that I didn’t even listen!”
    Brian couldn’t look at him. “I wasn’t talking enough,” he said,
    his voice rough and ashamed. “I… I was so used to wanting to be
    invisible—to liking it that way. I didn’t know how to make you see
    me. It’s my fault.…”
    “Shut up.…”
    “No, it’s my fault!” Brian looked up, and now he was doing a
    little bit of crying himself. Wel , he’d known it was coming. “It was
    my fault—”
    “Shut up!”
    “—if I’d been braver, like you—”
    “I’m serious!”
    And Brian found that he could yel if he needed to. “So am I,
    dammit!”
    “I was an idiot!”
    “And I was a coward!”
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    “That’s not true!”
    Brian broke completely. He found himself on his knees before
    Talker, taking his two hands, the sound and the crippled, and
    holding them to his cheeks.
    “O h G od, Tate. It is. I was a coward. I was so afraid I was
    wrong, so afraid I’d hurt you worse by coming out than I would by
    being quiet. I keep thinking, I could have saved you… I swear, if I
    could have shouted it or… or done anything but watch you walk out
    that door with that guy and hope you would be okay!”
    The wave of worry that had swel ed in his chest, made violent
    by silence and the horrible weeks spent watching Tate become
    someone